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D.L. Mayfield probably doesn't remember this, but back before we "knew" each other, she commented on one of my Her.meneutics articles, and added "also just wanted to say holla to a fellow ESL teacher!" I was pretty much pleased as punch to see the comment, because I'd been a fan of her column at McSweeney's Internet Tendency for a while.On her blog, DL writes about life in the upside-down kingdom and her experiments in downward mobility. You should follow her, for real. Besides both being ESL teachers, she and I share a love of Sufjan, the Pacific Northwest, and preschool girls whose names begin with R. I'm thrilled to share her words with you today.

Everything in our society teaches us to move away
from suffering, to move out of neighborhoods where there is high crime, to move
away from people who don’t look like us. But the gospel calls us to something
altogether different. We are to laugh at fear, to lean into suffering, to open
ourselves up to the stranger. Advent is the season when we remember Jesus put on
flesh and moved into our neighborhood. God’s getting born in a barn reminds us
that God shows up even in the forsaken corners of the earth.

From
Common Prayer, a Liturgy for Ordinary Radicals

Several
months ago, my husband, toddler and I all moved across the country in order to
relocate ourselves in a new neighborhood. One with significantly higher crime,
one with few people who looked or talked like us, one where the kingdom of God
was coming.

Not
everyone is called to this, it’s true; done poorly, incarnational living is
merely an experiment in gentrification. But as Advent teaches us, Jesus chose to
come and dwell in these abandoned places. And I can already testify, just
several months in: he is here. He is moving, he is working, he is changing
hearts that are willing. Including mine. For if there is anything to be gained
from the reading of the Christmas story, it is this message: am I willing to
seek and behold Jesus as he really is? Not some figment of my imagination, some
ethno-centric, political, health and wealth figure. But am I willing to see him
as somebody who came to free us all from what enslaves us? Am I willing to admit
that to follow him might mean to hang out in stables myself, to experience the
blessings of living in the places where he dwells?

The
people who recognized his greatness and beauty all hailed from the margins, they
were all in a place to see and recognize the truth. The kings and inn keepers
were too busy to notice the stars, to receive the gift given. Like it or not we
are empire people, those of us in the West. We have taken the story of Jesus and
toned it down, made it into a story for children. We gaze fondly at the figures
of animals and shepherds and wise men, never once dreaming that had this
incarnation happened in our time, we would be too busy to notice, too consumed
with the world.

But
Christ is here; working far beyond the boundaries of church buildings and
programs, right into the very corners of the most abandoned neighborhoods.
Perhaps he is calling you to experience some of the miracle, to partner in
making the word become flesh. Perhaps he is calling us to take a good long look
at our segregated communities, our segregated lives. Perhaps advent, more than
any other time, is a good place to consider following Jesus’ example, to
willingly place yourself where few would seek to be born, or to live, or to die.

Because
if we never hang out in the stables, we might miss out on the greatest gift of
all: seeing Jesus, for who he really is, living in our most broken
neighborhoods. He was someone who located himself in the abandoned places of the
Empire; might he be calling you to do the same?